What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?
When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest. Or when, even as just now I've tried to articulate exactly what I felt to be the truth. No one was satisfied
God is love, I said, but art's the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.
Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
Hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
There must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientists, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale.
I am an invisible man. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids - and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear.
The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to blind, imprison, and destroy.
America is woven of many strands. I would recognise them and let it so remain. Our fate is to become one, and yet many. This is not prophecy, but description.
By and large, the critics and readers gave me an affirmed sense of my identity as a writer. You might know this within yourself, but to have it affirmed by others is of utmost importance. Writing is, after all, a form of communication.
